Studies in American Fiction

"There was one man was bad to me. He said I was to be his little girl, but he was a bad man. … [I]t makes me different—what happened—doesn't it?"¹ In the early twentieth century, a sexually abused child like Hertha, the enigmatic center of Susan Glaspell's 1940 novel The Morning Is Near Us could only express her experience in broad and unspecific terms and conclude that there was now something that made her "different" in a world that valued chaste conformity in women. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, women of all classes, races, and cultures, as part of the Me, Too Movement, are asserting their right to tell their stories, to accuse and to seek justice against sexual abusers, and to refuse labels that stigmatize female sexuality. As in so many other ways, Glaspell (1876–1948), a Pulitzer-Prize–winning playwright and best-selling novelist, was ahead of her time. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Glaspell's fiction and plays repeatedly return to the vexed and uneven battlefield of sexual intimacy and violence, particularly the ways in which forced sex has destroyed or distorted women's lives. Glaspell's work articulates what many women could not: her writing speaks for women with limited agency and lack of access to justice due to their social class and their status as immigrants or children of immigrants.

Today Glaspell is best known for her one-act play Trifles (1916) in which an abused wife, Minnie Wright, kills her husband. In the play, neighboring farm wives try to imagine her life and motives, thus voicing what Minnie cannot or will not. The title "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), Glaspell's short-story version of Trifles, indicates her belief [End Page 199] that only other women, not the all-male juries that were typical of the era, could judge the mistreated wife.² The issue of domestic abuse as understood by women and misunderstood by men persists in Glaspell's mature novels, especially Brook Evans (1928) and Fugitive's Return (1929).³ Glaspell's exploration of these issues culminates in The Morning Is Near Us, in which domestic abuse intersects with complex and nuanced representations of class and ethnicity.

For the purposes of this article, I am using the term "ethnicity" not as a vague synonym for race but in the sense that it would have been understood in Glaspell's day—and until the recent present—to refer to a social group with a common national or cultural tradition (for example, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, German Americans, and so forth). As a woman born in 1876, Glaspell experienced the great wave of immigrants to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, a highly xenophobic period. The kind of domestic and sexual abuse to which women were subjected was amplified by their ethnicity, as it is for the fictional Hertha in The Morning Is Near Us. As Martha C. Carpentier aptly observes, Glaspell "conflates the immigrant, not only with the orphan, but with the rape victim, associating ethnic deracination with gender depredation."⁴

While Glaspell was certainly responding to the many examples of sexual abuse that were evident in American society at large, I contend in this essay that she was also reacting to the quite specific legal charge of seduction that her father Elmer Glaspell faced in 1881, when Susan was about five years old. "A household servant prosecuted Glaspell's father for sexual assault," Sharon E. Wood notes in her article "Susan Glaspell and the Politics of Sexuality."⁵ Wood briefly mentions this charge in the context of her argument about the extent of sexual exploitation and abuse in and around Glaspell's hometown, Davenport, Iowa, particularly as it relates to Glaspell's depiction of a so-called fallen woman in her second novel, The Visioning (1911). I was particularly intrigued by the accusation of legal seduction and decided to look further into it. In response to my queries, Katie Reinhardt, special collections librarian at the Davenport, Iowa Public Library, found the legal record...